Mamiko Okumura first noticed her son's stuttering when he was 2 years old. Amane was too young to be fluent in either English or Japanese, so Mamiko was understandably confused about what action to take.
"I couldn't tell if this was a normal thing, if it happened to all children when they started to speak or if it was even some kind of disease," Mamiko says.
As Amane's stutter worsened, his mother consulted various doctors and hospitals, borrowed "loads of books" from the library and searched websites in English and Japanese.